Syncopation, triplets and pickups

Put the accent on the "and" instead of the beat and the rhythm leans forward; the piano rags of Scott Joplin, such as The Entertainer of 1902, are built on it.

Accents off the beat

In the rhythms so far, long notes and accents have landed on the beats, especially on beat 1. Syncopation is what happens when they land somewhere else, on a weak beat or between beats, and keep doing it. The listener still feels the beat underneath, so a note that arrives early and holds through the next beat sounds like a push or a surprise. Composers make syncopation with ties that carry an off-beat note across the beat, with dots, with rests on the beat itself, or simply by playing the off-beat louder.

The most common syncopated figure in 4/4 is eighth, quarter, eighth: "1 & (2) & ". The quarter note starts on the "&" of beat 1 and covers beat 2, so beat 2 has no new note of its own. Another is the 3 + 3 + 2 grouping of eight eighth notes, accents on 1, the "&" of 2 and beat 4, heard in many styles of Latin American and popular music. Ragtime, the piano style Scott Joplin made famous with pieces such as The Entertainer, published by John Stark & Son in 1902, keeps a steady left-hand beat while the right hand syncopates against it.

Triplets borrow three from compound meter

Sometimes a piece in simple meter needs a beat split into three. A triplet fits three equal notes into the space normally taken by two, and is written with a small 3 over the group. Three triplet eighths last one quarter-note beat, so each lasts one third of a beat. At 90 BPM a beat is 0.667 seconds and a triplet eighth is about 0.222 seconds, compared with 0.333 for an ordinary eighth. The opposite also exists: a duplet squeezes two notes into the space of three in compound meter, marked with a 2. Music theory calls both borrowed divisions, because each borrows the other kind of meter’s split for a moment.

Pickups: starting before beat 1

Many melodies begin with one or two notes before the first strong beat, the way "a-" comes before "MAZ-" in Amazing Grace. Those notes are a pickup, also called an anacrusis, and they sit in an incomplete first bar. The usual convention is that the last bar of the piece is shortened by the same amount, so that the pickup and the last bar together make one full bar. When you count in a song with a pickup, count the full bar and start singing on the right beat: in a 3/4 song whose pickup is one beat, count "1, 2" and come in on 3.

Testing yourself

The lab below has four rhythms. Start with the steady pattern to set your baseline error, then try the syncopated one and see if your average error grows. In syncopated rhythms the usual mistake is to drift the off-beat notes toward the nearest beat, which shows up as a late or early bias in the panel. The triplet pattern checks whether you can split one beat into three even taps. Turn the guide off for a harder test, and remember that the scoring window is a quarter of a second at most, smaller when the notes are close together.